Amazon's brief courtship and complicated departure from New York

NEW YORK — Three hours before Amazon publicly broke up with New York City on Valentine’s Day, it held a meeting with top government officials. It did not go well.

At 8 a.m. on Thursday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s chief of staff Emma Wolfe and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo‘s chief adviser Melissa DeRosa attended the 90-minute, long-scheduledmeeting with an Amazon “community advisory council” about the company’s plans to build a sprawling headquarters in Long Island City, Queens.

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During the closed-door meeting in Long Island City, company officials defended their labor policies and facial recognition technology in response to months of public backlash,according to people who were there.

One city official who attendedcalled it “troubling” that Amazon made “zero mention” of addressing local concerns raised by the massive project. The official and others who talked about the Amazon developments spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

By 11 a.m., a top Amazon official working under Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called de Blasio to tell him the company was about to announce its intention to kill the deal altogether.

The decision, which Amazon executives made Wednesday night apart from the scheduled Thursday meeting with New York officials stunned those close to the project. Even the two company officials dispatched to defend the deal on Thursday appeared to have no idea it was over.

“The people even here in New York didn’t know what happened,” said one person involved in the monthslong deal that had become a lightning rod for liberal politicians.“That’s the problem. It was some Seattle decision.”

That decision sparked a circular firing squad, with Amazon blaming “state and local politicians,” de Blasio blaming Amazon and Cuomo blaming the state Senate, which he said “should be held accountable for this lost economic opportunity.” Amazon declined to answer follow-up questions.

One state senator, Queens Democrat Mike Gianaris, helped lead the opposition to Amazon’s plans for an at-least 4-million-square-foot headquarters that the company said would have generated at least 25,000 jobs. Like many others, he opposed the deal’s $3 billion in city and state incentives and its inclusion of a helipad for Bezos.

State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat, recently appointed Gianaris to a state board that would have wielded some control over the deal’s outcome, giving Amazon pause, according to an official involved in the deal.

Gianaris had his own reasons for concern. He witnessed self-described Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) topple Queens Democratic party boss and longtime U.S. House member Joseph Crowley in a congressional primary last year, and no doubt took notice of her unabashed criticism of the deal.

On Thursday he joined other opponents of the proposal to claim victory over a company they depicted as a high-handed Goliath with little appetite for community engagement.

“Amazon to the end refused to engage in a real conversation with the community they were trying to profoundly change,” Gianaris told POLITICO after Amazon’s announcement. “Rather than do that, they decided to leave, which shows why they would have been a bad partner for New York in any event.”

Some supporters of the deal derided Amazon’s poor rollout of the headquarters announcement, its willingness to pit states against each other, its resistance to the advice of its New York consultants and its inability to muster the nerve to move forward in a city that has a reputation for fighting development.

“This is the city. It’s noisy, it’s hot, it’s messy,” said another city official. “Every major company that’s headquartered here has dealt with it at some point or another. And they all deal with it. And they all work it, and make it work. And [Amazon's] unwillingness to do that is embarrassing for one of the largest companies in the world.”

“Their union stuff could’ve been handled much better and much differently and it should’ve been, in that room,” the city official at the Thursday meeting said. “This is not the right way to talk to a room full of people who are sticking their necks out about a development project or are dubious about the development project.”

Amazon’s apparently abrupt decision came even as the political tide seemed to be turning. A Siena poll earlier this week showed New Yorkers backed the deal by a wide margin. A respected Columbia University history professor published an op-ed in The New York Times headlined, “New York Needs Amazon.” And public housing residents rallied in favor of the deal on Monday.

Business interests took a dim view ofAmazon’s decision and the pressure it faced.

“If we give in to fear of the future, New York is going to seriously decline,” said Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City.

“On the short term basis it may not have an impact on the local economy, but in terms of growing the tech center in NYC it will have an impact because jobs will likely start and grow elsewhere,” said Ross F. Moskowitz, a land-use attorney with Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP.

One prominent urbanist said the deal boded ill for Amazon, too.

“Right now there is the assumption that everything is rosy in Crystal City, compared to ‘activist’ NY,” tweeted University of Toronto professor Richard Florida. "My guess is there is a backlash left to come in Greater DC as this news breaks & the project continues."